George Laurin recently spent about four months in Bethel, Alaska, helping the hospital there fill executive and administrative positions.

Laurin is an interim human resources executive with a healthcare executive search firm named B.E. Smith. He said Bethel is a city with about 5,600 people, and the hospital has about 50 beds.

The temperature in Bethel once got down to 69 below zero, during his four-month stay, Laurin explained.

“I eventually adjusted to the extremely cold weather. There are precautions you can take to cope with the weather,” Laurin said.

He said sometimes the snow accumulated as high as the roofs of houses, and there are only about 18 miles of roads within the entire town.

Laurin said you have to get to Bethel by airplane or snowmobile, because there are no access roads. He pointed out that people in very rural areas of Alaska sometimes have to drive in cars on frozen rivers to get where they need to go.

He said he drove on a frozen river, and he wasn’t afraid that he was going to fall in. People get an idea from weather reports when it is safe or not to drive on the frozen rivers.

Laurin said the healthcare system based in Bethel also has about 50 smaller healthcare clinics in very small villages in the expansive area around Bethel. He said many of these villages are predominately inhabited by Eskimos and only have a couple of hundred people.

He said some of the homes in these villages don’t even have running water, and the Eskimos still hunt their own food. Laurin said his friend David Friday, who is an Eskimo, has never bought meat from a store.

Laurin and his family moved to Americus in 1992. He was once the human resources director at Sumter Regional Hospital, before he moved on to other career endeavors. He credits his experience at SRH for much of the success he has with B.E. Smith.

Michael J. Ross writes for the Americus (Ga.) Times-Recorder.